Slitheen
Template:Doctorwhorace The Slitheen are a fictional family of massive, bipedal extraterrestrials from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and adversaries of the Doctor. They first appeared in the 2005 series episodes Aliens of London and World War Three. They are creatures of living calcium, hatched from eggs and native to the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius.
Raxacoricofallapatorians have a greenish tint to their skin and are eight feet tall with long forearms that end in powerful claws. They have a very developed sense of smell, able to track a single target across a few city blocks, and can sense if one of their own dies. Female Raxacoricofallapatorians can produce poisons within their bodies which they then use against their enemies. Known methods of delivery include a poisoned claw that can be fired like a dart and exhalation of poisoned breath.
The Slitheen are also able to disguise themselves by fitting into the skins of their victims, using compression fields created by a collar worn around their necks to squeeze their huge size into a slightly smaller space. The compression ratio has its limits, however, so the disguises tend to be that of already big-bodied people. The exchange of gases that compression entails also builds up within the acquired skin, causing a condition similar to flatulence in humans (the expelled gas smells like bad breath, which the Doctor noted was a form of calcium decay, although in reality the bacteria that cause tooth decay are different from those that cause bad breath). The compression field also has the side effect of weakening their calcium structures, making them vulnerable to acetic acid, which reacts explosively — and fatally — with their bodies.
The Slitheen are a ruthless criminal sect whose main motivation is profit, but they have an almost ritualised love of hunting, being trained to hunt and kill from a young age. The members of the family are convicted criminals on their planet, being subject to the death penalty if they return. One of the Raxacoricofallapatorian methods of execution is the lowering of the condemned into a cauldron of acetic acid, which is then heated to boiling. The acidity of the solution is formulated to dissolve the skin, allowing the internal organs to drop into the liquid while the condemned is still alive, resulting in a slow and painful death.
Template:Spoiler When they first appeared in Aliens of London, the Slitheen had been in Great Britain for quite some time, and managed to infiltrate themselves into various levels of British society, from community leaders and military personnel to mid-level politicians and government officials. Their intent was to instigate World War III and sell the radioactive remains of Earth to a depressed galactic economy as fuel for interstellar spacecraft. To that end, they staged the crash landing of an alien spaceship in central London on June 28, 2006, complete with a pig they had cybernetically augmented to provide an "extraterrestrial" body.
With the world in a state of heightened alert and panic, and with one of their number assuming the role of Acting Prime Minister, they persuaded the United Nations to give the United Kingdom permission to use its nuclear arsenal against the alien "massive weapons of destruction". Before the Slitheen could receive the launch codes, the Ninth Doctor arranged for an AGM-84 Harpoon missile to demolish 10 Downing Street, ending the scheme and presumably their lives.
However, at least one Slitheen (who had assumed the identity of Margaret Blaine of MI5) did survive and appeared in the episode Boom Town. In the intervening six months, "Blaine" managed to get elected as the Lord Mayor of Cardiff and planned to use the building of a new nuclear power station to get herself off Earth, but destroying the planet in the process. She was stopped by the Doctor and his companions, and on exposure to the "soul" of the TARDIS, regressed to an egg. The Doctor then took the egg back to the hatcheries on Raxacoricofallapatorius so she could be given a second chance at life.
A stuffed Raxacoricofallapatorian arm was among a collection of alien artefacts owned by American billionaire Henry van Statten in the year 2012 (Dalek).
The Slitheen also appeared in the spin-off novel The Monsters Inside by Stephen Cole. When the Doctor and Rose were arrested in the Justicia System in the year 2501, the Doctor shared a cell with Dram Fel Fotch and Ecoksa Slitheen, who claimed that after the Earth incident, the remains of the family went bankrupt and had become historians. However, it transpired that the Slitheen had not given up business, but were in conflict with a more influential family, the Blathreen. When the Doctor and Rose defeated an attempted Blathreen takeover of the system, the Slitheen were pleased to see they could once again become the profit-holders of their race.
Naming
One of the factors that narrowed down the Slitheen to their home planet was the fact that they had a hyphenated surname. Names took the form of Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, however the surname "Slitheen" is obviously not hyphenated. One subtitle gave the name Sip Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day-Slitheen, suggesting that Slitheen is a shortened form.